


Singularity, Self Similarity

by MadameFolie



Category: Sound Horizon
Genre: Backstory, Dimension Travel, Here we go!, Multiplicity/Plurality, SEI-YOU KOT-TOU, Speculation, Time Travel, YANEURA-DOU!, all interpretations are valid, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-19
Updated: 2016-02-19
Packaged: 2018-05-20 15:53:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6015126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadameFolie/pseuds/MadameFolie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The black cat in the box does not know if he is alive or if he is dead, but he does know that he loves his mother -- very, <i>very</i> much.</p><p>Or, three Singularities for the price of one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Singularity, Self Similarity

It was raining the day that he first met Mother. He remembers vividly how he was so cold and so tired though it was many, many years ago. So bone-deep weary he was, even drawing breath had become labor in itself. Some discarded this and cast-away that provided ill shelter from the elements. He remembers the wheels of her carriage pinwheeling through the dirt and the damp. They'd creaked to a halt at the mouth of the alley. He hadn't even the strength to lift his head and see. She came into his awareness as a low voice--

 

"Yes, right here. One moment if you please, Cristophe."

 

\--and into his view a pair of hands. Gloves, the color of wine.

 

"My," she had breathed, lifting him from his imitation of a den. "Such an unfortunate end." Rainwater cascading through her hair, kohl and rouge dissolving upon her face; she had seemed to him the most beautiful woman in the world. Perhaps by then his heart had already stopped. Perhaps, he thinks now, that is precisely how she came to find him. She had held his cooling body to her breast and borne him back to the carriage.

 

"Look, Cristophe," she'd said to the man opposite her, still holding him close. "This little one has come to wander outside the boundary as well."

 

"I see," the man had agreed, a discomfort in his voice the cat could not name nor have spared the effort. "I'll see if they can find some towels at the station. They may not let you bring him into the interview room, but we'll tend to him while you're there."

 

It had been the last thing he had seen before his awareness slipped away that day: mother's too-clever smile framed in too-deep crimson.

 

 

Mother's house is a lovely house. It is narrow like all the houses around it and takes up the top two stories of the building. The lower level is occupied by a foyer in Paris and a cabaret in Rouen. Sometimes they have a garden, when mother feels like it. His favorite room of all is the drawing room, because the windows in there reach from ceiling to floor. The cushions are thick, soft, womb-like. On a warm day he likes to wait for the bolts of light to strike the armchair so he can lay there with the sun pooling on his belly. If he could, he would always sleep in the drawing room. But Mother says they must mind the guests.

 

They receive many guests. Christophe is the only one who rings at the door; the others find their way in on their own. The first he meets is the winter child. Hiver is what Mother calls him, and he visits them very often. He lies still upon the chaise as if in slumber. His hands are always folded atop his stomach. Though his eyes do not open and he never stirs, his breast rises and falls. The hourglass on the mantle runs of its own accord as he sleeps. The sand trickles between the halves, neither filling nor emptying either: time in stasis. Mother will drift to and from the room to smooth his hair. Never does the cat feel cold but he curls up against him to feel his warmth never the less and is never troubled by his visits.

 

The same cannot be said for Noël, who descends upon Mother's home like a storm. His rage rattles the windows and the cat hisses at him -- how _dare_ he -- but the beastly child dashes Mother's china and profanes her with his vile tongue. And when he dissipates Mother wills the room back to order and the cat is fast to her side, with promises it will not happen again. His skull aches as if to burst.

 

"We can't have that," she chides him. "He's one of our most valued customers, you know."

 

Don't let him come back. I don't like him, he says. Mother strokes his fur, smiling that private little smile in her eyes.

 

"Don't say that. You and he are more alike than you think. Like brothers, almost." He presses his head into her fingers until they rake through to the flesh.

 

I don't need a brother, he insists. He has all he could need.

 

 

 

There are nights where Mother dons her cloak and recedes on foot into the darkness for hours. He would not dare follow without her bidding. There comes a knock on the door one such cool, foggy evening. They are not expecting clients or company, so the cat does not mind the door. And yet Christophe allows himself in.

 

"Sherry?" Christophe asks as he helps himself to Madame's entertaining wares. "Or do you prefer cream?" He uprights two glasses with a flourish and smile at the cat as though he thinks himself clever. Something sits ill with the cat about his paying a call unannounced. He bats Christophe's hat from the low table. It lands flat on its top, brim open to the room.

 

Mother is out, he tells her guest. Come back in the morning if you need something.

 

"Need? Monsieur Kitten, I am here merely for the pleasure of your company. I didn't wake you, perchance, did I?" He lowers his self into the velveteen armchair beside the mantle, drink in hand.

 

No, he responds. Though he is certain Christophe would not have been deterred either way.

 

"Have you been well? You're looking much healthier since we first met." The cat eyes the empty glass still sitting over by the sherry.

 

Yes, the Madame has been good to me. I am very fortunate.

 

"More so than you know." Christophe sips at his drink, then. "Tell me, monsieur, you've been here some time -- have you ever been to one of Madame's shows?"

 

Yes, the cat replies. Mother sings, sometimes, or there are several brief acts. Some are melancholy, some are bawdy. Some are grisly to watch, candy syrup dyed red too lifelike to stomach for long. Human concerns and human amusements. He does not see the point of Christophe's line of questioning but does not tell him so. Perhaps his is a human concern as well. The cat has yet to understand the concerns of men.

 

"My word! And the customers don't mind a cat running about? You've got a very sporting audience there, my friend." The cat agrees, he supposes so. "Many regulars, I imagine?"

 

The cat does not know. The faces are not that important to him. Some stroke him, some may tempt him with morsels from the table. What matters it to him who comes and goes, when he has Mother? Christophe taps his cane idly against the arch of his foot.

 

"I couldn't ask you to keep an eye on your regulars, could I? I'm looking for someone, and I think you might be able to help."

 

I could try. Maybe.

 

"I would appreciate that, my friend."

 

When Christophe at last announces his departure, he pauses at the door.

 

"Do take care when out on the streets after dark," he warns the cat. "You're a good young man, and many a good young man has vanished here in the night."

 

His cheerful humming resounds in the air long after he has faded from the glow of the streetlights.

 

 

 

One morning he wakes to find himself naked upon the carpet. With no fur to shield him, the pile scratches his skin. He cries out in alarm. The voice on his tongue is human. He is so very cold. This is how mother finds him, still kneeling on the ground.

 

"Oh!" One hand rests her fingertips to her lips in surprise. The other clasps her robe haphazardly in place. The cat lifts his own hands, now the hands of a man, to see them properly.

 

"Mother," he says, for the first time.

 

After his transformation, haircut is a matter of utmost import. A card furnished by Christophe leads them into town, where he is introduced to the curious as Madame's ward. Madame, he is to call her around others, rather than Mother. He can hardly grasp the reality of the man in the mirror, with his broad shoulders and his bare face. He does his best not to stare. Mother says it's unbecoming to stare. The gentleman with the scissor clips his head-hair short, as is supposedly in fashion. Clothes are a more complicated matter. Try as he may, he cannot become accustomed to the constricting garments humans seem so fond of.

 

He lies awake on the chaise long after the lamps have been turned down for the night. The collar of his sleeping shirt is stifling about his throat. When he can lie still no longer, he whiles away the time passing the curtain fringe over his fingers just to feel the soft coils of silk slip between them. His mismatched eyes, not uncommon for a cat, stand out terribly on him as a man. He tries to will them to evenness as best he can -- he manages little change. Mother is forced to procure tinted glasses for him from a doctor of ill repute.

 

On some clear days, Mother will go to sketch at la Jatte. He goes with, in the form of her cat or the form of her ward. In the afternoon sun, the waters of the Seine glimmer. Mother draws her charcoal along the page, shaping the remains of cities long dead -- stone columns crumbling in the arid wind, or churches gutted by fire. She lets him watch, though he will one day learn it is not considered polite to peer over shoulders so. He has never seen such a thing before. Abandoned buildings, yes. But never entire worlds gone to ruin.

 

"It's eternal recurrence," she tells him. "History repeating itself, like the sands of an hourglass." The cat thinks. He does not know a great deal about the world. The world and history are so much larger than he. But he supposes he can see the hourglass in Mother's drawing room in his head and perhaps it is enough. As he lies awake that evening, he takes the hourglass from the mantle and turns it over in his hands. He tries to imagine each grain a life, the flow of the sand the collapse of worlds. It takes a long time for the world in the glass to fall completely silent.

 

When the weather turns warm, he helps Mother tend to the garden. She could easily will it into bloom, or turn the soil with a thought. However, she tells him, the most splendid flowers are the ones that bloom of their own accord. Nurture them, she says, feed them, and they grow to the best of their ability. What magnificent flower grown by force could compare? The cat understands what she means. He feels pity for the plants, though. For the yellowing stems. For the leaves savaged by insects. He flicks a beetle off. It splits its back open and buzzes away. The fertilizer is foul-textured, even through the gardening gloves. The sun beats down on their backs and the cat cannot wipe his brow as fast as he perspires. He trusts that for Mother, it is worth it.

 

 

 

Their third home, in Shibuya, is the most forgiving of his peculiarities. Nothing about him stands out there among so many people, not his mannerisms or his speech. Nothing save for his eyes; even those can be accounted for, the fashions being what they are in the twenty-first century. His darkened glasses draw no notice, either, when he chooses to wear them. Mother concedes to let him come and go as he pleases. Though for all his newfound freedom, he still much prefers home and her company.

 

In this time and place, the house's interior becomes reversed -- the shop moves to the top floor and their living and entertaining quarters to the ground. The cabaret disappears entirely. It is a very odd arrangement, compared to the many before it. He is fond of the antiques, though, and enjoys the time he spends in the shop. The language of the place is entirely different from any he has heard before. And yet he settles into it as easily as if it has been lying in wait in his mind for him to call upon it. Mother sends him on many errands on her behalf. Often, she allows him to pick out flowers for the drawing room and the store.

 

The daughter of the florists whose shop is beside his home is kind to him as both man and beast. She supplies him with treats when he visits as a cat and gives the antique dealer's ward many more flowers than his arrangements call for.

 

"It's a gift!" she protests, when he tries to decline. "Tell your mother, it's for all her good business!"

 

Mother smiles an impenetrable smile when he passes the message and the flowers along.

 

"Sweet girl," she observes. The slender petals of a spider lily curl perfectly about the tip of her finger. "She does deserve a better fate, doesn't she?" Mother plucks a petal and lets it fall to the table. It drifts, flickering in and out of existence from moment to moment. By the time it touches down, it is pulsing with static power. Mother cocks her head.

 

"I don't think there's anything to be done for her. More's the pity."

 

She is a very nice girl. But Mother's word is law.

 

 

 

The transforming is not all there is, he discovers in time. Mother has said that he wanders beyond the boundary. In truth, he wanders beyond many boundaries. His consciousness strays at night, and more and more often during the day. He finds his self stuck behind the eyes of a pigeon on the roof upon waking one morning and unable to go back. In the end he must fly down and peck at the window until Mother spots him. She laughs at the absurdity of his plight, but opens the window for him and returns him to his body before breakfast.

 

It is only with practice that he learns to control it. He teaches himself to purposefully throw his consciousness from one host to another. He passes many of the long evenings of Mother's absences working at it. He watches his own body lie in the sitting room from the mirror on the wall, or from the reflection on the surface of a glass of water. From water-mirror to wall-mirror, to his abandoned spectacles on the table he flits, watching.

 

This is how he finds his self in Mother's mirror, paralyzed by the sight of her scrubbing furiously beneath her nails. Filth and blood spatter into the basin, spiraling into loose coils in the water. The scent of death is stifling. With a gasp he trips, and opens his eyes to see that he has fallen back into his body.

 

 

 

Without warning, Noël's boot connects with the spot where the cat's tail had been not a moment before.

 

"Witch!" He bellows, sending the cat's hackles up on to end. "Right now, witch! Get out here and fix me!" The cat turns on his heels and before he has even faced the little brat in full he has made the shift to a man. He seizes Noël by the collar of his shirt and yanks him close.

 

"What do you want," he growls.

 

"Let me go," Noël spits. "Your psycho master did-- _did_ something to me! Get her out here, or I'll drag her out myself!" Fortuitously, it does not escalate. Mother comes forth from the stockroom, turning a lace fan over in her hands.

 

"Little Noël! What a pleasant surprise." She pulls a chair to her desk for him. "How can I help you?"

 

"Like you don't know!" He twists free of the cat's grip and seizes her by the arms before the cat can catch him. The chair clatters onto its side. "Change it back!"

 

"I haven't the faintest what you're talking about."

 

"The hell you don't."

 

"Darling." This she addresses to the cat, not averting her eyes from Noël's for an instant. "Please help our client to a seat so we can discuss this." The cat scrambles for the fallen chair.

 

Noël looks away once he is seated. Mother prompts him, taking to the chair across the desk from him and beckoning with the fan. With fingers as stiff as if they had been filled with lead, Noël gathers the hair falling over one eye in his hands and draws it aside. Where the one eye exposed before had been blue, the other is a violet so vibrant as to be almost crimson.

 

"The _fuck_ did you do to me?!" he cries. His voice pitches and cracks. Mother's countenance does not falter.

 

"I haven't done anything," she says mildly. The fan flicks open and then shut in her fingers. "When did this begin?"

 

"I don't know. I can't remember..." Noël rubs at some pain in his temple. Mother waits as his eyes narrow. She studies his posture, his fear. For a moment her expression darkens almost imperceptibly. "I can't remember anything."

 

The cat does not like this conversation. He slips back into his beast body to curl against Mother's breast. She rests her hand on the nape of his neck.

 

"...am I dreaming?" Noël asks at last. "Where _am_ I?"

 

"You're here, beyond the boundaries. Nowhere."

 

"I don't understand. What's...what's happening to me?" All the rage has bled from his voice. He trembles. She does not answer Noël's question, and perhaps it is because she cannot. The cat catches a glimpse of Noël's reflection as he leads him back to the drawing room -- and nearly recoils. The man in the mirror over the mantle has withered to bones in his hands.

 

 

 

He does not care much for sleep, he finds, not anymore. Not when he does not know what will come if he relinquishes his hold on his self.

 

 

 

"Who are you to Mother?" The cat asks of Christophe when they are next in the same time and place. The house is in Paris, the steel city and its strange tongue the dream of another day. The late morning sunlight swells to fill the room. It stings his eyes -- a residual effect of sleeping less. Mother is still dressing for a day in town. Christophe seems taken aback by the question.

 

"Who am I?" He laughs, though the cat cannot imagine why. "I am an old friend of hers, you could say. We go back a long way. Has she never told you how we met?"

 

"She told me you were there the day she found me." Though he supposes it isn't the same thing, something feels important about that.

 

"Ah, well. It's not my story to tell. You should ask her, if you can."

 

"Oh? Ask me what?" Mother stands behind the settee, her toilette complete. She's done her eyes with kohl and painted her lips. The cat has learned that her manner of dress is considered untoward. He has heard that her lashes droop too low and her mouth splits too wide. The cat still thinks she is the loveliest woman he has ever seen. She rests a gloved hand on his shoulder from behind the settee and it pleases the cat to his very bones. Christophe pushes his self to his feet and offers her his arm. The warmth on the cat's shoulder withdraws.

 

"Enchanting as ever, my dear. Well worth the wait." She takes his arm, smiling, though the cat has come to learn a great deal about how many things a smile can mean -- especially one of Mother's. Her smile for Christophe is polished, expertly, and sealed. "Shall we?"

 

 

 

He'd never noticed before. Noël and Hiver never visit at the same time. The electric lighting of the izakaya across the street pierces through the lace curtains, washing the room in dull red. A man laughs; Hiver sleeps on. Chicken and charcoal and sizzling fat and beer saturate the air. It smells so enticing. The cat wonders, is he becoming more man than beast?

 

In Rouen, he climbs to the roof as a cat and snaps the neck of a sparrow for her. This gift he lays out upon the threshold. But the foul tang of the blood seeps into his gums even hours after he has washed his mouth clean. His neck throbs in sympathy. He wakes in the night violently ill and cannot stop himself retching where he lays. From the mirror's point of vantage, he can see his own pale, sweating, human face.

 

The sand in the hourglass beside it has begun to flow backwards.

 

When Mother finds him in the morning, he has done what he can to remove the mess. Still, she can tell at a glance what has passed during the night. She waves the room clean and draws him to her side.

 

"Poor child," she says, her hands warm upon his back. "You never wished for this, did you." The words bring his gut to roiling again and his eyes begin to well with tears.

 

"I don't feel so good," he tells her. He clamps a hand over his mouth, fearing he may be ill yet more. Mother smells as strongly of blood as had his own claws.

 

"Shh." Mother cradles his head and holds him close. "Poor child. Let's get you some tea."

 

 

 

His own reflection unsettles him. The man in the glass still does not feel like him. He had thought before that it had been an effect of his transformation. Naturally, it isn't him. A simple explanation for a simple problem. So he'd thought.

 

Not so.

 

The man is not him. The beast is not him. He touches his fingers to the mirror's cool surface and presses.

 

Nothing happens. The glass is solid under his hand. He just looks sallow and stupid with his sunken features and oversized t-shirt, leaning against the mirror like an idiot. He brushes teeth that don't feel like they belong in his mouth and spits, toothpaste stinging his tongue. Then he goes to check the drawing room before he turns in for the night. They have no guests. Perhaps he should be relieved. He isn't. The light in Mother's room is still out, so he locks the front door and leaves a lamp on in the entryway for when she returns. Whatever it is she does at night, whatever it is that Christophe is watching for, it does not matter to him. The Madame is his mother, and he will love her all the same -- steeped in blood or otherwise.

 

 

 

He faints.

 

Mother tells him so when he comes to, lying with his head upon her lap. His clothes are matted to his skin by sweat gone cold. The room his spinning. Mother's face is crinkled in pain. She looks...sad? Why is Mother sad, he wonders. Wonders, but does not say since he is too dizzy to speak. The hair falling into his eyes is soft and pale. He wonders about that, too. But he cannot dwell on it long before sleep overtakes him.

 

Many times he stirs in his sleep. His room is dark, he cannot see. When he brings his hands to his face to ground his self, his fingertips are calloused and rough.

 

What is _happening_ to him?

 

 

 

Hiver visits. Where the cat had once slept by his side, he now cannot draw near lest his head begin to swim. It is a pity, he thinks. He suspects he may have been fond of Hiver. He marvels instead over the hourglass sands, spilling in both directions as Hiver slumbers. Spilling as they do always. Spilling. Spilling. And then they stop.

 

The sand has never stopped before.

 

The air in the room changes for a moment, as if a pulse of static has shot through it. The cat turns. Hiver is rigid on the settee. Rigid, and then he spasms. Before he collapses, he sees Hiver's back arc off the settee-- his eyelids snap open. And the last thing he sees are Hiver's mismatched eyes, rolling back into his skull as the cat's vision fades to black.

 

For a long time, he floats. His consciousness ebbs and flows like the tides of an hourglass. There are spells of awareness, where he sees the birth and death of worlds. The choruses of lives sing in his veins. When he next awakens, he cannot orient himself, try as he may. Everything seems to have shifted as he slept. It is as if he is seeing things reflected, as they might be in a mirror.

 

Or, he realizes, from the other side of a mirror. He is looking at Mother's house from the other side of the mirror on the mantle. The day is beautiful beyond the windows. And opposite him stands Mother, examining what he has become. The moment he meets her eyes, he is seized with pain; in that moment, so infinitesimally small as to forever be branded upon his memory, he sees a ghost. It is the ghost of a girl with matted hair and sprays of crimson paint all over her gaunt form.

 

Mother--

 

He presses his self to the mirror. Nothing happens. Cold panic seizes his chest. At least, he thinks it may be his chest. He is not so sure of his body or his being. He is everywhere and nowhere; he is everyone, and nobody at all.

 

Mother, he calls out to her. Mother, help me! Mother, please--

 

She raises her hand to the smooth glass. The cat tries to put his palm to hers. He has the memory of a palm, he has the memory of the warmth of hers. Is it that which he feels now? Is he feeling, now? Or is he merely remembering what it is to feel? He cannot be certain, and for that reason he is afraid. A heaving breath forces itself from his lungs; he chokes on the sheer size of it. Keens in terror.

 

Please help me, he begs. Mother caresses the surface of the mirror. Would that he could fit his head into the curve of her hand as before.

 

"Oh, my darling," she breathes. "You don't need my help anymore. Can't you see you're finally free?"

 

 

 

That evening, the shop stays open late into the evening. After all, Mother says they have a very important guest to receive. And --she tells the cat, as his consciousness flickers from one locus to the next, giddy with freedom from the cage of mere reality, with freedom beyond compare-- they certainly can't disappoint such a valuable customer.


End file.
